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Continuous quality improvement focuses on the customer and, therefore, requires attention to customers’ feedback as a vital input. Customers’ feedback in general hospitals includes utilization statistics of various services, patient satisfaction surveys and patients’ complaints. The role of complaint data as a management tool, and particularly as applied to quality improvement, has received little attention in the literature. As a quality control tool, complaints are investigated on the individual, unit and organizational levels. Repeated complaints about the same units, procedures or individuals, are especially important for quality review. The role of the hospital administration is to draw on the human, technological and procedural resources at its disposal, along a solution time interval (immediate, short and long term), in designing its policy for quality improvement. Presents three examples of policy changes. The aggregate of complaint data serves, in addition, for follow‐up of the effect of changes introduced by policy decisions.

Describes and contrasts the perceptions of formal and informal authority of hospital directors of two different kinds of organizations: hospitals that are part of public multi‐hospital organizations (PMOs) and independent hospitals. Indicates that all the directors perceive their informal authority to be greater than their formal authority. However, there is a gap in the perception of formal and informal authority by directors of the two types of hospital. Directors of independent hospitals perceive themselves to have more formal and informal authority than do their colleagues at hospitals that are part of PMOs. Both structural and personal explanations for these findings are given. In addition, discusses the implications for policy making of the source of authority, informal, and formal authority in the transition to autonomous semi‐independent hospitals in a changing environment.

Given the enormous size of the health care industry, the problem of developing high‐quality, cost‐effective health care delivery systems is growing in importance. There is general consensus that health care systems require a continuous process of quality improvement (QI). Less agreement, however, surrounds the mechanisms to be implemented so that such a process is effective. This study aims to bring empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that a QI program in a general hospital – a special context of the health care delivery system – does not necessarily lead to better overall organizational performance results.

The study was done at the hospital level, and included all acute care hospitals in Israel. Data was collected in 16 of the country's 23 hospitals, a 70 percent response rate. The study compared hospital performance before and after the QI program implementation.

The study shows that QI creates meaningful improvement events. In addition, the research supports the hypothesis that increasing the number of QI activities (items) included in the QI program brings about more improvement events. The results do not support the hypothesis that high, rather than low, intensive implementation of QI activities leads to more improvement events.

The special context of general hospitals decreases the effects of a QI program on overall hospital performance, whereas QI activities function as triggers in initiating improvement events.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new safety self‐efficacy construct and to explore its antecedents and interaction with standardization to influence in‐patient safety. Design/methodology/approach – The paper used a survey of 161 nurses using a self‐administered questionnaire over a 14‐day period in two large Israeli general hospitals. Nurses answered questions relating to four safety self‐efficacy antecedents: enactive mastery experiences; managers as safety role models; verbal persuasion; and safety priority, that relate to the perceived level of standardization and safety self‐efficacy. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the scale's construct validity. Regression models were used to test hypotheses regarding the antecedents and influence of safety self‐efficacy. Findings – Results indicate that: managers as safety role models; distributing safety information; and priority given to safety, contributed to safety self‐efficacy. Additionally, standardization moderated the effects of safety self‐efficacy and patient safety such that safety self‐efficacy was positively associated with patient safety when standardization was low rather than high. Hospital managers should be aware of individual motivations as safety self‐efficacy when evaluating the potential influence of standardization on patient safety. Originality/value – Theoretically, the study introduces a new safety self‐efficacy concept, and captures its antecedents and influence on safety performance. Also, the study suggests safety self‐efficacy as a boundary condition for the influence of standardization on safety performance. Implementing standardization in healthcare is problematic because not all processes can be standardized. In this case, self‐efficacy plays an important role in securing patient safety. Hence, safety self‐efficacy may serve as a “substitute‐for‐standardization,” by promoting staff behaviors that affect patient safety.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Knowledge sharing in research communities has been considered indispensable to progress in science. The aim of this paper is to analyze the mechanisms restricting knowledge sharing in science. It considers three categories of academia–industry knowledge transfer and a range of individual and contextual variables as possible predictors of knowledge-sharing restrictions.

A unique empirical data sample was collected based on a survey among 212 life science researchers affiliated with universities and other non-profit research institutions. A rich descriptive analysis was followed by binominal regression analysis, including relevant checks for the robustness of the results.

Researchers in academia who actively collaborate with industry are more likely to omit relevant content from publications in co-authorship with other academic researchers; delay their co-authored publications, exclude relevant content during public presentations; and deny requests for access to their unpublished and published knowledge.

This study informs policymakers that different types of knowledge-sharing restrictions are predicted by different individual and contextual factors, which suggests that policies concerning academia–industry knowledge and technology transfer should be tailored to contextual specificities.

This study contributes new predictors of knowledge-sharing restrictions to the literature on academia–industry interactions, including outcome expectations, trust and sharing climate. This study augments the knowledge management literature by separately considering the roles of various academic knowledge-transfer activities in instigating different types of knowledge-sharing restrictions in scientific research.

One of the major exams of leadership skills of a leader is the challenge of managing conflicts within the organization or within society he heads. Perhaps, this is the biggest challenge especially when there is a situation of external threat on that society. In this situation when the leader who is unable to maintain internal cohesion, then the danger is that it will accelerate the breakdown in make it easier for the external enemy to destroy that society. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Jewish tradition, using formative ancient stories, tried to teach us how a leader should behave in a crisis, and how not to behave.

In this article, the author wants to show how Jewish tradition, using formative ancient stories, tried to teach us how a leader should behave in a crisis, and how not to behave. The rabbis of the Jewish tradition, that had written the Babylonian Talmud, reviewed the defeat of the Jewish people, in 70th as a failure of the leaders. Through the stories that tried to show us the responsibility of leadership, they pointed out the weaknesses of the leaders and saw them as the main person responsible for the loss occurred, when Jerusalem fell. In contrast, other stories show us how other leaders, deserved to overcome a major crisis and come out stronger.

The author wants to show how stories reveal three models of leadership: a weak and cowardly leadership that enables the growth of terrorist leadership, extreme and dogmatic leaders against tolerant leadership, leadership of nonviolent revolution. The situations in which leadership is being tested are varied. At the time of a great crisis of society at risk, during the siege of Jerusalem, one of the stories takes place precisely in the house, between two people, with the presence of leaders, to show the social disintegration among the common people, and the failure of leaders to build a moral society.

The positive example of overcoming the crisis and conflict, occurs after the destruction of Jerusalem in the Beit Midrash of the survivors in Yavneh. Perhaps the trauma of destruction leads the leaders to resolve the conflict in a nonviolent way.

The author tried to extract from the Jewish tradition the right model for managing crisis and conflict. The sages reflected on the serious crises that had happened to the Jewish people and they claimed that the leadership was the main cause of the failure.